On the Threshold: Exile exhibition view, 2025. (Photo: Sergey Bratkov).

Each communal gallery in Berlin is an exhibition space sponsored by one of the city’s districts; together, they form a very special network, yet another constellation on the art map. Commercial galleries, foundations, collections, and museums are distinct entities, collectively forming a complex tapestry of overlapping paths that takes some time to comprehend. Communal galleries add to this complexity. Normally somewhat underfunded and with an air of public service about them, they are open to visitors at no cost, often situated in great locations, boasting decade-long exhibition programs featuring both well-known and lesser-known artists.

Sergey Bratkov, Untitled, 2025. C-print, acrylic. (Photo: Vladimir Dudchenko).

It is interesting how this very concept has developed almost independently in then divided Berlin (of course, the rivaling halves were monitoring developments on the other side of the wall, using them as leverage on their local authorities). For example, one of the oldest of its kind is Fotogalerie Friedrichshein, which was established in 1985 in the DDR’s East and continues to operate to this day. The oldest though is Kommunale Galerie Berlin, which opened its doors in a Nazi-era administrative building in Charlottenburg’s Hohenzollerndamm (center of West Berlin) in 1974.

On the Threshold: Exile exhibition view, 2025. (Photo: Vladimir Dudchenko).

This gallery comprises a set of corridors and rooms of varying sizes, situated on two stories, and typically hosts two exhibitions simultaneously. The newest one, called “On the Threshold: Exile,” is dedicated to the threshold existence of new immigrants, a limbo where a person lives after severing old ties and before forming new ones. Curated by Eleonora Frolov, it shows three artists: Ukrainian Sergey Bratkov (b. 1960), German Ben Greber (b. 1979), and Israeli Atalya Laufer (b. 1979) – all currently working in Berlin. So what stories do these artists tell, and what synergy do they create?

Sergey Bratkov is an artist working mainly with the medium of photography. He was born and lived until 2000 in Kharkov, USSR (now Kharkiv, Ukraine),  becoming a notable participant in the so-called 2^nd generation of the Kharkiv School, a loosely organized but influential group of photographers spanning several decades. After moving to Moscow, he quickly became a prominent member of the local scene as well. Later, he exhibited in both the Ukrainian (2003) and Russian (2007) national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, as well as in other major international exhibitions.

Sergey Bratkov, Untitled, 2025. Foam, wax, acrylic. (Photo: Vladimir Dudchenko).

However, in 2022, he immigrated again: this time, as soon as possible, leaving everything behind to start a new life. His first station was Frankfurt am Main. This current Berlin exhibition, comprising works created over the last three years, conveys a sense of extreme alienation, among other things. A burnt-through foam mattress looking as if a person fell asleep with a cigarette and melted through the floor (Untitled, 2025); a transparent plastic wrapping in the shape of a suitcase, like a ghost of travel (Skin of Skin, 2025); a video with the № character flashing on the blank screen and documentary murmur and calling out of numbers you hear when you enter a Behörde (public authority): getting through the bureaucratic machine in Germany is a quest requiring moral strength and psychic stamina (№, 2023).

Sergey Bratkov, Skin of Skin, 2025. Metal, plastic. (Photo: Sergey Bratkov).

Sergey has also written a poetic and frightening annotation to this show, describing his threshold experience: “To live on the border – it is as if you were living between the hemispheres of your brain: with one leg in the left, the other in the right. More precisely: with one leg still in the familiar, “my” world, the other in the foreign, “other” world. And there you stand – completely alone. If you have questions, you have to pay.”

Ultimately, he asks himself if he still has a voice—a person who has lived so long in Moscow, with a Ukrainian passport. His photographs are partially painted over; one was taken in front of a Charlottenburg store but looks a lot like a pigeon-stained window in his tiny hotel room in Frankfurt.

Atalya Laufer shows a large-scale site-specific piece made from painted fabric (Exodus, 2024). It is dedicated to the journey of her father, then a little boy, travelling in 1947 with his parents on board the Exodus 47, a ship heading for Palestine under British mandate. These Jewish people, among approximately 4500 others, have just survived war in Europe and are filled with the hope for a new life. Later, the ship was stopped by the British authorities. After a violent clash, the immigrants were deported to the UK occupation zone in Germany and deterred, a darkly ironic change of players in the same settings. Ultimately, the history of Exodus 47 put international pressure on the British government and contributed to the founding of Israel. Knowing all that, Laufer serenely reconstructs thoughts and observations of the boy who’s taking strips of memories with him across the big blue sea.

Atalya Laufer, Exodus, 2024. Chalk, pencils, gouache on fabric. (Photo: Vladimir Dudchenko).

Ben Greber was born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He offers a recollection of his family history in his own land, which, at some point, may have become alien and may do the same trick again. There’s an oil portrait of his grandfather, who had worked in the Imperial Railway during World War II and died in an air raid in 1944 in Cologne. Near it, the cast of a toy railroad, a hint at his father’s collection of locomotive models; the ashen display looks like a toy concentration camp. These are supplemented by minimalist sculptures made of resin, plastic, epoxy, glass, stainless steel, and paint. Far from being neutral, Substation (Bogensee) reconstructs retractable windows in Joseph Goebbels’s lavish villa, where he had a private cinema. Wall-mounted pieces of Substation (Ismaning) represent a stele that supported antennae used for the dissemination of Nazi propaganda.

Ben Greber, Substation (Ismaning), 2025. Plastic, colored acrylic glass, glass, stainless steel, rubber. (Photo: Vladimir Dudchenko).

Put together, these works by artists of wildly opposed ancestry assure us: the limbo is always there; nobody is truly safe from this internally severed existence on the threshold. And the journey never ends: only during the past hundred years, Berlin has been more than once a driving force for immigrants and more than once a place where immigrants fled to; it only takes one or two generations. But at least for now, descendants of people who were driving each other away only to be purged themselves can stay and exhibit together in this communal city, where the German language is only one of the multitude spoken.